The Midnight Folk (Kay Harker)

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His teenage experiences as a naval cadet and then in the merchant navy provided the seafaring subplot in the novel, though his maiden voyage in 1894 to Chile, when he was not yet 16, was ruinous to his health. Nevertheless, on his return home to recuperate his authoritarian aunt insisted on him pursuing this career, to his dismay. Part of my own ease comes from remembering myself at the same age, with the same sense of life being a dreamscape where reality was of one substance with imaginings. Maybe a lot of the novel's strange-yet-familiar quality comes from the author's own remembered past being a kind of foreign country, where "they do things differently".

In 1885 orphan Kay Harker finds himself under the guardianship of the distant Sir Theopompous and the stern tutelage of an unnamed governess. His former companions, a collection of stuffed toys, have evidently been removed, their place taken by the declension of Latin adjectives for 'sharp', and by exercises in French, Divinity and the like. Re-reading The Midnight Folk on kindle as an adult I was finally able to decode the arcane references to the classics and Latin grammar early on in the story but still feel I am somehow missing the point. The weird dislocations of the story, which constantly jumps between reality/ dreamworld/ nightmare/ magic / past and present etc , just don't make sense to me any more now, than as a child. I mean to say... I can follow them.... But I don't like the confusing jumble. Of course that is the whole point of magic....it doesn't make sense and transcends the real world, but personally I prefer more structure and less confusion in my stories. Many times Masefield tells the reader through Kay... Oh it must have been a dream.... To account for the confusion ... But then after all it's not a dream.... Flynn, Simon: "A Magic Curiously Suited to Radio?": The BBC and The Box of Delights. The Journal of the John Masefield Society, No. 12 (May 2003), pp.21–35. The Box of Delights is a children's fantasy novel by John Masefield. It is a sequel to The Midnight Folk, and was first published in 1935. It is also known as When The Wolves Were Running. I know 'The Box of Delights' is equally bonkers and arguably just as much a series of episodes strung together, but surely it has more of a sense of plot? I haven't read it: perhaps the BBC adaptation is more of a rescue job that it is given credit for. I can see the potential for adaptation in this one, with its imaginative and visual sensibility and many a vivid character to enjoy (though the fact that several of them speak with an idiom as incoherent as the overall storyline doesn't help). What I can't imagine is reading this to a child, less still a child reading it for themselves.At seventeen Masefield was living as a vagrant in America. He found work as a bar hand but eventually secured employment at a carpet factory. Thinking that journalism might allow him to write for a living, Masefield returned to England in 1897. Piers Torday (30 November 2017). "Long before Harry Potter, The Box of Delights remade children's fantasy". The Guardian . Retrieved 7 January 2018. In 1958, John Keir Cross wrote a radio adaptation of the book for the BBC. It was broadcast on Children's Hour in five parts during the lead up to Christmas that year. Patricia Hayes played Kay Harker and the narrator was Richard Hurndall. [4]

Hely-Hutchinson: The BBC man who created the ultimate Christmas music". About the BBC. 13 December 2016. a b Kingsley, Madeleine (17 November 1984), "A Box Full of Magic", Radio Times, pp.101–103 , retrieved 14 October 2017

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Masefield’s first volume of oetry, Salt-Water Ballads, was published in 1902, however, it was not until the publication of The Everlasting Mercy in 1911 that he made his mark on the literary scene. The success of his second book was followed by the publication of several long narrative poems, including Dauber (1914) and Reynard the Fox (1919). Too many characters, too many shifts in time and place, too many dreams, or dreams which turn out not to be dreams, and despite almost constant movement from our protagonist, no sense that any of it is really directed or intentional, the plot seemed to happen all around him, despite him. Lots of scenes of people telling other people what other people had done, were doing, or were going to do. The Midnight Folk is written as one piece. There are no chapter divisions. Division within the text is obtained by moving from prose to verse or even song in some places. He has written a book which will be a source of delight to children of future generations well as his own, one that ranks with such masterpieces in this genre The Water Babies, Alice in Wonderland and Sylvie and Bruno. — The Northern Whig, 1927 [1] Kay's toys (known as "the guards") have been taken away from him at the start of the book, apparently because they will remind him of his parents; there is a strong implication that Kay's parents are deceased. The guards play little part in the main narrative but have a critical role in the final recovery of the treasure.